In many communications-related standards a need exists for an instruction that allows getting or putting several bits from or to a register without having to operate on one hit at a time through a series of bit load or bit store instructions. For example, in ADSL QAM encoding every other bit from a bit stream is packed together to create a two's complement integer. When performing puncturing in convolutional encoding, some of the encoder's output bits are omitted before transmission. In one puncturing technique, every fourth bit is removed. In another case, bits 3, 4, 9, 10, 15, 16 and the like are removed. When performing bit-wise interleaving, a bit stream is shuffled to increase protection against bursts of errors. One mapping used in 802.11a requires that the reordered bit stream contains bits 1, 21, 38, 55, 75, 92 and the like of the original bit stream.